“First of all college basketball doesn’t control college basketball. The NBA controls college basketball. They are the ones along with the players union that sets the rule. College basketball just reacts to what the NBA does to include the early entry date. College basketball put out April 10th. Well that date doesn’t mean anything. April 29th is when guys have a chance to put their names in the NBA draft. I think one of the main things that has to happen is college basketball has to have a relationship with the NBA. There should be someone in charge of college basketball who on a day-to-day basis sets an agenda for our great sport. We don’t have anything like that. As a resolve we don’t have a voice with the NBA or the players union and that’s just kind of sad.”

For the record, he’s not wrong here. College presidents and colleges would come down on the same side here as the NBA owners — they all want to extend this to two or three and done. That’s good for the coaches, good for the universities’ pocketbooks, good for the NBA owners and teams that get longer to scout and evaluate young players.

But for me, it comes back to this — if you are good enough to be in the NBA at age 18, why shouldn’t you be allowed to? Because NBA owners and their scouts sometimes make bad choices on high school players? Because other kids get bad advice and come out when they shouldn’t? So the truly talented and ready should be punished because other people screwed up? Nice system there.

Nobody likes one-and-done. I still like the college baseball system (you can be drafted out of high school — and I think you shouldn’t lose your elegibility if you work out for teams and test the waters — but if you go to college you are there three years). But that is not perfect and the NBA owners don’t like it.

The age limit got pushed aside during the NBA’s lockout, a committee is supposed to take it up later. But in the end they will probably just leave it at one year as the compromise nobody likes.

A. Owners love the idea of a higher age limit in the NBA — it gives them more time to see how a player matures, allows more time to scout them so taking the player is less of a gamble, and it lets the NCAA do a couple years of marketing to create names for players that the league can then capitalize on.

B. Mark Cuban is an NBA owner. Fairly outspoken one

So A+B= Cuban favors raising the age limit. He’d like it at three years, actually. Shocking.

“It’s not even so much about lottery busts,” Cuban said. “It’s about kids’ lives that we’re ruining. Even if you’re a first-round pick and you have three years of guaranteed money — or two years now of guaranteed money — then what? Because if you’re a bust and it turns out you just can’t play in the NBA, your ‘rocks for jocks’ one year of schooling isn’t going to get you far.

“I just don’t think it takes into consideration the kids enough. Obviously, I think there’s significant benefit for the NBA. It’s not my decision to make, but that’s my opinion on it.”

You are ruining a kid’s life by drafting him in the first round and giving him some guaranteed millions? Even if he is a bust he should be set for life (many aren’t, but that’s not about a year in college because plenty of four-year players blew their NBA paychecks).

Drafting a kid out of high school is hard because, well, predicting what any 18-year-old will be like in five years is a crapshoot.

But I think if you are 18 and you are old enough to get married or join the army or do anything else with your life you should be able to play in the NBA if you are good enough. Is there really a reason that the LeBron James/Kobe Bryant/Dwight Howard type players have to go to college other than the owners don’t like the risk?

I’d still prefer a baseball style system — NBA teams can draft a guy out of high school but if he does go to college he needs to stay two or three years. It’s not a perfect system either, but it’s better than one-and-done.

On today’s edition of PBT extra you can comment on my opinion that the owners want two years but that it’s not fair to the handful of players who are truly ready to make the leap from high school (I want a system like college baseball), or Andrew Bynum and him needing to grow up.

David Stern has some ideas about how to solve the problem of so-called “one and done” players at the college level — you know, guys who go to school for just one year simply because the NBA’s age limit makes it impossible to declare for the draft straight out of high school. But they aren’t necessarily serious, and they aren’t necessarily ideas that the NCAA might want to hear.

Speaking in Phoenix before the Suns faced the Spurs on Tuesday, Stern took some playful shots at the NCAA when the topic of these “one and done” players came up. He essentially put the onus on the schools for making sure the players keep their ends of the bargain where classes and scholarships are concerned.

“A college could always not have players who are one and done,” Stern said. “They could do that. They could actually require the players to go to classes.

“Or they could get the players to agree that they stay in school, and ask for their scholarship money back if they didn’t fulfill their promises. There’s all kinds of things that, if a bunch of people got together and really wanted to do it, instead of talk about it …”

At this point in the discussion, deputy commissioner Adam Silver made a face that seemed to say, “I wish he hadn’t said that.” But Stern was largely light-hearted in his suggestions, and talked bigger picture about young players whose primary goal is to secure a place in the NBA.

“Years ago, I said to the NCAA, I’ve got a great idea,” he said. ‘We’ll insure a select group of basketball players. And that will make them more likely to stay in school, because they won’t feel the loss of a big contract. We’ll designate a pool, and those that are lucky enough to be drafted and make money will pay us back, and those that don’t, it’s our expense. The NCAA I think took it to a committee, that takes it to a census, that took it to a conference, then they have a congress and they came back to me and they said, well, it will only work under our rules if we do that for all sports. And I said, I don’t think that’ll work.”

But what would work, at least for the NBA, is a longer period of time to evaluate talent at the college level.

“I agree with the NCAA that it would be great for us — I’m not concerned about NCAA, and our rules are not social programs,” Stern said. “We don’t think it’s appropriate for us to lecture kids as to whether they should or shouldn’t go to school. For our business purposes, the longer we can get to look at young men playing against first-rate competition, that’s a good thing. Because draft picks are very valuable things.

“For the young men we say, you can go to college,” Stern continued. “You can play in the NBA Development League, (as an 18-year old), or you can go to Europe. And we’ve had players go to the D-League and be drafted, we’ve had players go to Europe and be drafted, and we’ve had players go to college. For us, it’s one more year. We proposed to the players two more, and it was sufficiently contentious around that. We agreed, as all good negotiators do, we referred it to a sub-committee and we’re going to have meetings about it to see how that works out. ”

Stern and Silver were careful to point out that they have an excellent relationship with NCAA president Mark Emmert, and again, even the shots came with big smiles and laughs all around. But it’s clear that Stern believes the “one and done” problem is an NCAA-only issue, and it isn’t one that he seems to have any interest in helping to solve at any point in the immediate future.

I keep hearing NBA owners want to adopt same rule as NFL. Players will have to wait 3 yrs to enter the draft.

I am not mentioning this because I trust the coaches sources, but rather the debate is interesting and alive as part of the ongoing labor talks. Right now the rule is players need to be one year out of high school to enter the NBA draft, which has led to the one-and-done college player, a system nobody really likes. The owners have hinted at wanting to increase that number, the players union says it wants to abolish it completely.

You can bet Rice and his fellow college coaches like the idea of locking up the best players for three years (and there is trickle down, if John Wall still has a year at Kentucky some good young point guard is going to go somewhere else, like maybe Rutgers). There is no doubt that would be good for the college game.

But to me it is fundamentally un-American to tell someone “you have the skills but you can’t earn a living doing it yet.” This isn’t making a person wait to drive or drink — those are issues of societal safety. This is taking years of earnings away from someone. Why should LeBron James need to go to three years of college when he was ready at 18 to play in the NBA? Again, we can go down the list of guys in the league now (Kobe Bryant, Dwight Howard, Kevin Garnett) who came straight out of high school and adjusted. (For the record, I get it more in the NFL where no 18 year old is strong enough physically for the pounding at the next level.)

The owners want a higher age limit because they want players to develop on somebody else’s dime. They think they can make better draft choices if their scouts get a couple more years to watch players (they don’t make better choices, they just find new busts). They see it as getting free player development and reduced risks.

Personally, I like the baseball rule: You can get drafted right out of high school, but if you are not you have to spend three years in college.

It’s hard to see this as being a sticking point in negotiations, not compared to the issues of money anyway. But don’t be shocked if the age limit goes up in these talks, if the owners are insistent this is an area where the players may give in.